Tables Turning
by Wickfield
Summary: David Copperfield. At the breakfast table, Uriah petitions to have his mother move in with the Wickfields – and things instantly change.


_From Agnes' POV. I hope you guys can handle some more Wickfield and Heep fic - I just always wanted to see this scene and David doesn't show it!_

**Written for FanFic100!**

**Tables Turning**

_056. Breakfast._

* * *

Uriah had decided to take breakfast with Papa and myself again that morning. I cannot say I was glad to have him there – in fact (though I suppose it is uncharitable), I wished with all my heart for the old days, when he took his meals in the office, balancing his dish on his knees, and Papa and I had an hour to ourselves, in which to plan our day or discuss the dreams of the night before. Those days were long gone, however, by the time of which I write – Uriah had increasingly begun to inject himself, sitting straight across from me, with a good view of Papa. I wondered what satisfaction he derived from joining us at table, particularly as he seemed astonished and honored to be there at all, and requested no more than the most meagre scraps reserved from the meals of the day before. I assume he relished the very fact that we could not send him away; that he reveled in our discomfort, which, despite all our efforts, was made all too clear in the overwhelming silence that presided. And yet I presented the façade of perfect equipoise, as though his appearance there did not affect anything in the slightest.

Papa was ill on that particular morning from the effects of his consumption the ni ght before, and the usual cheese and bread sickened him – when I offered it as was our custom, he vehemently thrust it back with a shamed apology. Uriah offered me some dish and of course I could not accept. It was all very awkward, with Uriah's clear pleasure, Papa's obvious illness, and my inability to eat anything put in front of me.

At length, Uriah cleared his throat. "If you are feeling quite well, Mr. Wickfield….?" He swivelled his head to look up into my father's face (which he was supporting in both his hands).

"Yes, Uriah, go on with it."

"Thank you! Well, as I was telling Miss Agnes, just the other day, mother has been very under the weather, wasn't I telling you, Miss Agnes?" I nodded. He had read me the entire letter. "Mother has been very under the weather. I think there might be a flu going about, because you don't look well, sir."

"I'm quite all right, Uriah, thank you."

"Glad to ear it! So glad! Well, I was thinking I am a very charitable person, you know, and especially so to those as 'ave done well by me. Now I can't bear to think of mother hacking and feeling gen'rally bad, and so I would proposition that she…" he looked exceedingly modest, and drank meekly from his glass.

I glanced at Papa. Poor Papa! He looked as though he wished to dash from the room, as though he'd do anything to finish the discussion and sink into solitude. And yet I knew that, to bring Mrs. Heep into our home, would be the same as letting an evil spirit from a magic ring (even if she were not bad herself) – the consequences, two of them in perfect harmony, wielding their influence over my father and I – was too much to bear.

I glanced fervently at Papa, trying to convey this to him in my look, but he was too sick, and I felt the sharp glare of Uriah's small eyes upon my face, which caused me to instinctively yield. I had no power.

"So you would like your mother to stay, Uriah?"

"Oh! Oh!" he looked positively stricken. " Could she? She wouldn't take up much space – she an't so tall as me," he added, mildly, "and she could even take my room, near the office."

"Yet you cannot both stay there," I remarked, thinking Papa would reject the proposition on the grounds of too little space, but I instantly regretted my words, for Uriah nodded and commented, "How thoughtful you are, my dear Miss Agnes! How unfathomably considerate! Alas, we would need two rooms, and as I couldn't think of that… I shall have to consider other options…."

"You don't intend to leave!" Papa cried, raising his head, but Uriah merely regarded his napkin, as though to say, "who knows what the future holds?"

"Well – well," Papa looked helplessly to me, "he could have – he could have Trotwood's room, couldn't he, my dear?"

"Papa – " said, hesitantly, and looking very closely at him.

"It's the only empty room, Agnes," my father urged – I think he must have forgotten that Trotwood's room was but two doors away from mine.

"I couldn't possibly do that!" Uriah cried, instantly. "Master Copperfield don't visit often – I imagine it'll be less and less, now he's employed, you know, and learning the ways of this world – but the room must be ready for him always, always!"

"Oh, nonsense!" Papa said quickly, and I saw, with sadness, that he felt Uriah's power over him keenly. And it was soon settled – Mrs. Heep was to take Uriah's old room and he was to take Trotwood's.

"Mother will find a tender companion in you, Miss Agnes, I'm sure," Uriah observed as soon as my father had left the room.

I looked hard at him, but he never took his eyes from my face, and I made no reply.

* * *

I had met Mrs. Heep but once or twice before, many years past, when she had fetched Uriah home on holidays or his birthday in November; and I had had a very wicked laugh over her with Trotwood, who had visited her and who he characteristically described as looking exactly like her son, which she did. She seemed to remember me much better, which startled me somewhat, as though we'd been intimate companions in a former life, and said I'd grown so much (which was of course, true) and had come to be quite a beauty. Here she looked so suggestively at Uriah (or seemed to) that I was put quite out of countenance, until Papa sent me to introduce her room.

Upon stepping over the threshold, she fell into such raptures I feared her small fragile body would collapse with each new gasp. The room still bore the traces of Uriah's Spartan preferences – a few books, a desk, a calendar on the wall with violent red X's obliterating each day – but as for her own decorating, Mrs. Heep promptly put one pillow on one of the bare wooden chairs, and seemed to be highly pleased with the effect, and quite at home.

All that day, for Papa's sake, I listened to Mrs. Heep's lamentations of leaving "the old house," as she called it; such earnest expressions might have been quite moving and touching, if I had felt them to be at all sincere. Perhaps I was of too suspicious a nature at the time, but Mrs. Heep's continued references to "Father" (her husband, I soon realized, not her ancestor) and the "early days" they had spent in their little hut, were so broken by quick and surreptitious studies of our furniture, drapes, piano, and my dress and jewelry that I really suspected they possessed a sort of falseness, and would have liked to leave the room if ever I had the chance.

"Miss Agnes is a very kind person, Mother," Uriah Heep grinned, when we met them in the hall. His eye lingered on the link of Mrs. Heep's arm with mine. "Very condescending to people so lowly as ourselves, mother, to be sure. And I am certain, mother, if ever you are in need of company, Miss Agnes would be appy to oblige you."

From then on Mrs. Heep was, indeed, my constant companion; whereas I used to join my father in playing our favorite songs, even with Uriah looming in the next room, I was now pulled away from my father, as though to an opposite pole, and Uriah tended to my father instead. All of this, I felt, would lead to some kind of evil; even I, with my sheltered and solitary habits, was aware of that. And yet when I suggested this timidly to my father, after planning my speech for several days, he only rebuked me, and that I could not bear at all, for even in his distress or alteration, he was still the one person I honored and loved most in the world.

I think I have forgotten to mention another aspect of this change in our house. I did not notice it for several weeks. I cannot say if even I might have dreamed it. But one night, as I read in my bed, in my night dress, my plain hair let down along my shoulders, and a solitary candle flickering at my side, I thought at felt a movement at my door, which was barred. It was a strange sound, like the noise of footsteps, yet they did not continue but – I think – they sounded as though they paused at my door; and a chill spread over me, to think of he who now lived two doors away, and I quickly pulled the curtains about the bed and snuffed the candle.

Yet perhaps I dreamed it. Even if I did not, it matters very little.


End file.
